Its a long game. The deep state needs to weaken Russia. Russia insists on its own culture, language, religion, borders and ability to act unilaterally, as a nation.
These are things that all nations used to believe, but are to be abolished under the utopian dreams of progressives, statists, and globalists working under the banner of the US Dollar.
The fact that Russia is a european power, makes them and their position even more of a threaten.
But he real question is: why Russia? What did they ever do to us? You ID one of the popular reasons, which is that Russia is an independent, Xian, sovereign nation. As such, it poses an unacceptable obstacle to one world government.
However, I subscribe to an alternative explanation, one which might explain why Trump changed his position. (Besides realizing he would be JFK'd by the Deep state.) And that is this: you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. While technology has improved extraction rates, the fact is we reached peak resources - including easily accessible fossil fuels - during the last decade.
Russia represents the last great area of reserves. The West must have them for themselves in order to be able to drive humanity over the technological hurdle which includes quantum computing, replicative DNA and simulated reality. In other words, artificial intelligence.
I think the power players sat Trump down and explained the situation to him. ME reserves are classified information - SA may be well past the down slope. We know Mexico is on the skids. It's why Trump is opening up drilling areas and coal mining regions.
It is this driving necessity that forms the modern slogan "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam".